Energy Markets and Responsive Grids

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed a steady shift in the nature of power generation worldwide. While the share of renewable-based distributed generation has been on the rise, there has also been a decline in the conventional synchronous- based generation. The renewable-based power generation interfaced to the grid via power-electronic converters, however, does not provide rotational inertia, an inher- ent feature of synchronous machines. This absence of inertia has been highlighted as the prime source for the increasing frequency violations and severely impacting grid stability. As a countermeasure, virtual or synthetic inertia and damping emulated by advanced control techniques have been proposed. In this chapter, we study the optimal placement and tuning of these devices. We discuss two approaches based on the control notion of H2 system gain characterizing the amplification of a disturbance and the spectral notion of pole-placement. A comprehensive analysis accompanied by iterative gradient-based algorithms is presented for both the approaches and validated on a three-area test case for comparison. 1